Realistically, how much should a website cost?

Every web development agency is known for either being secretive about their web design prices, or throwing around huge and unrealistic numbers, when in reality the most common modern website design cost can easily fit within the $200-$400 range.

How much does it cost to build a website

Not much! For clarity, let’s only talk about building a simple business-card type website with no custom built CMS (Content Management System) in this article. These types of websites are ideal for small businesses who operate mainly offline. For example restaurants who publish their best meals and prices on their website or a fun canoeing service for your friends and family.

No matter what a web page designer is telling you, in reality such a website can be built within just one or maximum two days. In fact, it will take a professional web designer an hour or two at most! Makes you wonder what the hell are they charging you for, right?

Sometimes web designers try to justify their high fees by using the word responsive over and over again. A responsive web design means that your website will be perfectly viewable in all devices (desktop computers, laptops and mobile phones). A responsive design seemingly adjusts itself to fit every screen size perfectly. It might seem like magic or some type of Artificial Intelligence to anyone who has no idea how web design works, but in reality this too is nothing complicated!

Responsive web design is not rocket science

Whenever I start building a new theme or design, I make it responsive as I build it. I do it by checking my theme with the Firefox plugin called L-Square to identify screen sizes where the design starts to break. I then note the screen size and create a separate CSS style for this particular screen size. Not that hard! If anything, it’s a little more time consuming, but the end result will be a lot better than using a generic responsive template because every theme or design is unique and it’s best to treat them all differently.

I get why web designers might charge a little extra for a responsive design, but mostly they are just trying to make it look like something super hard that will take long hours with a lot of coffee, sweat and tears… and that’s just silly.

Spend most on marketing, not web design!

It should be obvious enough, but people are still getting it wrong. The toughest part of any website development is the actual marketing itself and not coding. Depending on your niche, it can take weeks, if not months to make your website properly visible on the internet. Anyone who claims they can make it happen within a day is either lying to you or using questionable methods that will do more harm than good in the long run.

It’s an ongoing process and shouldn’t be advertised as “set and forget” by the web designers. Proper marketing is something you do consistently, a little bit every day.

And it’s best to learn it yourself

Don’t get me wrong, I could be your professional marketing agent, but it’s going to be a pain in the ass! If your website is about car parts or something else extremely boring (for me) it will be hard for me to promote this stuff because I would have to write articles about something I know nothing about and post on relevant communities and forums on topics I barely understand.

So depending on your niche, it’s sometimes advised to do the marketing yourself because you arethe only person with the right mindset, attitude and passion. It will make your entire online image more personal and REAL if You are behind it and not some guy who doesn’t even understand your business.

How to learn marketing quickly you ask?

A good place to start is Warrior Forum where people with different businesses all come together and share the latest ideas, tricks and trends in internet marketing!

You can also contact me and we’ll see if I can help you with your website and business as a whole. It’s always a good idea to get some outside feedback.

I’m not going to give you my contact details directly. Be creative and find a way to contact me yourself!